Pain

Pain

Pain is your body telling you that you have hurt it. This is a good thing, important when you are injured. It can also help diagnose problems with your body. Sometimes pain continues long after it's necessary. Amputees report phantom pain in the legs or arms they no longer have.
There are different kinds of pain, and describing the type is useful in diagnosis: recurring, constant, steady, knife-like, radiating, sharp, dull. Medicines that dull pain are analgesics. Those that kill all feeling are anesthetics.

Radiculopathy is a shooting pain in the arms or legs, says Yevgeniy Khavkin, MD, a neurosurgeon at Southern Hills Hospital. In this video, he shows how a bulging disc in the spine causes radiculopathy.

A weekly exfoliating foot facial can help prevent foot pain by reducing swelling, muscle spasms and soreness, and by moisturizing the skin and nails. Watch as podiatrist Suzanne Levine, DPM, explains the benefits and shares her exfoliant recipe.

The main causes of foot pain include gravity, weight gain, the aging process, genetics and even gender. In this video, podiatrist Suzanne Levine, DPM, explains the factors that cause foot pain, and why women tend to experience it more than men.

Recent research has shown that the brain can create pain that is identical to the pain of a physical injury. Research has also shown that an emotional insult is processed in exactly the same way in the brain as a physical insult. We now know that stressful life events and our emotional reactions to them may cause pain that can be severe. Treating this type of pain with pain medications, injections or surgery is usually not effective, thus leaving the patient extremely frustrated and depressed.

Neurological research demonstrates that the brain has the capacity of neuroplasticity (the ability to create new nerve pathways in response to life events). For example, when you learn to play the piano or swing a golf club, your brain cells are developing new pathways that are connected to your body. These pathways consist of thousands of nerve cells. The more a pathway is activated or practiced, the stronger it becomes.

What most doctors do not fully understand is that pain can be caused by this type of learned pathway. Even when there’s no tissue damage in the body, such as a tumor, a fracture, or an infection, a learned pathway can cause real, physical pain.

When anti-convulsant (seizure) medications that used to work to treat the facial pain of trigeminal neuralgia begin to cause intolerable side effects you should obtain an MRI scan of the brain to see the trigeminal nerve. Electrical pain on one side of the face can be caused by an artery or vein pulsating against that nerve in a sensitive zone as it enters the brainstem. There are surgical options to treat this “neuropathic” facial pain that can be explained by an expert neurosurgeon experienced in the treatment of facial pain.

Dental work or nasal surgery can spark or “kindle” a unique kind of pain that comes from the nerve to your face and not from your teeth or jaw. This “neuropathic” pain typically has electrical quality to it and does not respond to anti-inflammatory medicines or traditional pain medicines. The cause is thought to be a kind of “short circuit” of the nerve caused by an artery or vein pulsating against the nerve near the brainstem, the problem is not in your face, jaw or teeth. The pain may be alleviated by a medicine that is also used to treat seizures. It works by slowing electrical conduction in the nerve. To be sure of the cause, you may want to see a neurologist or neurosurgeon who has experience in treating facial nerve pain.

The most common type of facial pain is pain related to dental problems, such as an abscess in a tooth or a cavity. That pain is located on one side of the face in the jaw, is worse with eating and is worse with touching or manipulating a specific tooth. It's usually an aching pain, and many of us are familiar with this sort of pain. When you have that kind of pain, then a dental evaluation is obviously the first thing to do.

When muscle and joint pain arises, some parents will give their kids anti-inflammatory medications before practices or games so they don’t miss any playing time. The problem is, these medications only block the chemical process that produces inflammatory pain, so continuing the activity simply puts more stress on the already-injured tissue. By masking important symptoms, kids run the risk of experiencing more extensive injuries and more time away from the action. Ice is preferable to anti-inflammatories as a first-line treatment for pain after injury or activity.

The emotional component of pain is multifactorial and includes past experiences, genetic factors, general states of health, the presence of depression and other psychological diagnosis, coping mechanisms and beliefs and fears surrounding the pain diagnosis. Importantly, thoughts as well as other sensations can influence the sensory pain input to consciousness as well as the emotional coloring of the pain sensation. The term given for this modulation of pain impulses is the "gate control theory of pain." Thus thoughts (beliefs, fears, depression, anxiety, anger, helplessness, etc.), as well as peripherally-generated sensations can both dampen or amplify pain. Indeed, in many chronic pain conditions (that lack of any effective therapy for the sensory/pain component), a reduction of pain and the resulting suffering can only be affected by modulating the psychological aspects of pain. As the psychological contribution to pain varies enormously from person to person, this approach has to be individualized.